Giants in the Landscape: Did People Explain Big Things with Big People?

Britain and Ireland are full of giants' belongings: Giant's Graves, Chairs, Causeways and Hills, chalk giants and giants of legend. A familiar idea holds that people explained big things with big people. I test it with open data. I gathered 331 giant-named places (OS Open Names for Great Britain, the Irish Sites and Monuments Record with its Ordnance Survey map names, OpenStreetMap, and open barrow, megalith and hillfort datasets), all 1,849 Irish megalithic tombs with a usable position, and 33 legends that a written source ties to a place. Giant places were compared with 50 monuments or names of the same type from the same 50 km square, using 2,000 replicate control sets, with terrain prominence from an elevation model as the measure of size where no size is recorded. Giants own graves: 86% of English giant names call the place a grave or bed, and 82% of Irish giant places are megalithic tombs. 212 Irish tombs (25% of those with a map name) are Giant's Graves or Beds, mostly in the north, and only 4% of passage tombs are. Giant's Graves are not more prominent than other tombs nearby: 13% sit on a local high point, against 25% of other named tombs (chance below 0.001). In Great Britain, 36% of giant names lie within 1 km of a prehistoric monument, against 18% of matched names. The legends use giants to explain gorges, islands and monuments, but the names point less to size than to age. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/giants/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/giants. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/27/giants/.